Funds being over stretched as ever, I wanted a way to present a little gift to neighbours without it costing the earth. So I measured the size of a cake case and designed the box around that. This will also fit standard size individual mince pies so will be ideal for little treats for Christmas too. If you make handmade jewellery or want to give neighbours a few sweets to know they are thought of, these boxes are ideal.

Small Gift Box. Ideal for sweets cupcakes or mince pies 😉

You Will Need

A4 cardstock 260 gsm or above. You can also use 12 x 12″ if you prefer

Scoring board, I’m using a Scor It board.

Steel Ruler

Scoring Tool

Cutting Mat

Bone Folder

Scissors

PVA glue

Brush or scrap of sturdy card (white or pearlised to prevent colour transfer)

Decorative ribbon to co-ordinate with your card

Topper of you choice (or you can emboss off cut card to decorate the panels of the box)

Method

This is a simple project but it will be much easier to show you how to create it with a video.

Part 1: Card size and Score Lines

Part 2. Assembly and Finishing

Options/Added Extras

In the film I was demonstrating with printer paper for high contrast. For your own box I’d advise cardstock of 250 gsm or above. The boxes look superb made in pearl cardstock such as Centura Pearl available from Crafters Companion.

If you have a cardstock friendly printer, why not design your own background patters with Craft Artist or your favorite crafting CD. For your first box, start with plain card, just to get the hang of where all the folds appear on the box. Once you know your way around use your favorite patterned card.

Today I’d like to share a picture of a card I made using Serif’s Craft Artist programme.

Floral Birthday Card

I do like the versatility of the programme and that you can be just as creative as if you made the whole thing on your desk from the various elements.

With Craft Artist I chose papers, elements which I altered and duplicated so there is a lot of scope for adding your own mark to projects. When times are lean and budgets are too, digital kits are a fabulous way of making you pennies go further. They even offer a free trial of the software and some of the digikits are available for free. So trying it out doesn’t have to cost you anything but the download time.

Hope you give the programme a try, its amazing. I still love my inks and getting messy but I am also a fan of digital crafting like this too.

For those of you who like to make New Years Resolutions, and those like me with bad memories. Perhaps you want a quick n easy way to remind you when birthdays are coming up. A short tutorial today, that is quick n simple to do but should help you to remember the birthdays of those you cherish.

Birthday List with Serif Craft Artist

You Will Need

Computer

Serif Craft Artist

Digikit: Season of Giving

160 gsm card stock

Printer

Method

Open Craft Artist Program

Go to Blank Projects and select your paper size, I wanted A6 so I went to the custom section and typed in the dimensions there.

From the digikits choose: Season of Giving

Add the ‘Gift log’ from the embellishment section of that kit, by doing a single click onto it, you could add the whole digi kit if you wish or just the specific items you want. Also add a material in the colour of your choice.

You will now see a blank page on the work area of Craft Artist, this is where you put the items you want to print. On the left of your screen, the items you added from your digikit will be in the tabbed sections marked; Backgrounds, embellishments etc.

Drag the gift log picture from the embellishments tab area, on the left, onto your blank page. As you ‘drop’ the embellishment will stay on your page, you can move it around, or resize it, till it is where you would like it to appear.

Next go to the materials section and bring over a piece of material. Click on the SCISSOR tool, then choose PUNCHES and the square punch to cut a narrow strip from the material. Place the strip of material over the words Gift Log and drag on the corners of the piece of material until it fits the area you want.

Go to the TEXT tool at the top of the page, click it once, then click on your page, this activates the tool. If you go back to the top of the screen you can select from any font on your computer. Type the words ‘Birthday list’ on top of you material. When the text is selected like this, you can also drag the corners of the box around it, to resize the text larger or smaller. Move the text to where you would like it on the page by dragging it there using your mouse.

Click save and then print onto your chosen cardstock.

You can create this project any size. The original is for you to list all the birthdays on one page. If you have lots of people to buy for, an alternative would be to make a separate page for each month. Like this one.

Birthday List with Serif Craft Artist.

Hope you can follow this tutorial ok and I’d love to see what you make, do leave me a link to your projects with your comments. If I can work out how to add pictures from screenshots, I’ll try to share more complex tutorials with Craft Artist.

Links

I highly recomend the Craft Artist Professional Program and the Photo Project software too. If you haven’t got the Craft Artist software yet, get in touch with Serif as I believe the PhotoProjects programe includes Craft Artist Professional and gives you even more tools.

As the year comes to a close I thought it would be a good time to look back at some of my favorite things of 2011. Today I’d like to share;

My favorite products of 2011

Like last time there are two products that stood out for me this year.

First place by a country mile is; Serif Craft Artist software.

Craft Artist Platinum Edition by Serif

I adore this product as it is so simple to use but has so much versatility and superb digikits. It has a lot of the features of products like Adobe Photoshop Elements but without the HUGE learning curve.

My wonderful husband gave me a copy of this and I’ve had so much fun with it this year and have collected lots of digikits. I love to use it to try out ideas and techniques and especially love that all the wonderful elements can be used over and over again, which when you are on a small budget makes a big difference. Serif have digi kits on their Daisy Trail site and some of them are even free 🙂 Perfect when you want to treat yourself but the budget says no.

In second place; Brittany Birch knitting needles

Brittany; Birch knitting needles

Trying to knit with RSI is foolish! It hurts, but if you are mad enough to risk it, try these birch needles. I can only knit a row or two at a time and have to rest for some time between attempts but these needles are warm to the touch and so much kinder to the hands than anything else. Super smooth like metal no drag like plastic and they are nice and light to hold too.

How about you?

Those were my favourites of the year, but how about you, what product have you tried this year and now love? Would love to hear about it.

Links

To find out more about the items I’ve mentioned, follow the links below to their original posts.

Craft Artist includes links to Daisy Trail from which you cam buy the software and digikits

Today I’d like to share a picture of the hand-warmers I made for the family for Christmas.

Hand warmer, with gift bag and instructions tag

Often hand warmers are scented, which not everyone likes. My husband’s family have wheat intolerance and often the hand-warmers sold are filled with wheat. I have filled these with dried lentils and no fragrance 🙂

There is an inner bag that contains the filling and then an outer cover, this allows the cover to be removed and washed as needed. These are a small size, so they will fit into your coat pocket. Great for when your hands get cold when walking the dog/ de-icing the car.

Hand making Christmas gifts are a great way to share meaningful presants with friends and family. You can create them in the warmth of your home, no long cues, no bad weather and if you start making them early in the year, no rush 🙂 Take the stress out of Christmas and hand make your gifts. Short notice for this year, perhaps, but make a plan for next year for a more relaxing build up to the holidays.

The card explaining how to heat the hand-warmer and what it contains, I created in Craft Artist 🙂 Really pleased how professional they look. I also layered papers to make the gift bag using digikits in Craft Artist, plus matching gift tag. These were a lot of fun to make and I’ll be showing a video tutorial on how to make the gift bags next year, once the brighter weather returns.

Today I’d like to share some pictures of gift bags that I recently made. This years Christmas card has a holly theme and I found the perfect gift bags in John Lewis BUT when I tried to order them online they had sold out of the size I needed. {sob}. After a plea for help, my dear friend Lynn (Garden Pinks) pointed me to a tutorial that had printed gift bags. The tutorial was excellent but the bags themselves were not quite to my style, so as Tricia Morris would say, I made it my own, and here are the results.

Medium/Large Gift Bag. Christmas Holly 2011

From the tutorial I took the basic measurements and tried them out on paper, learned how it all went together then went to design some papers. Opened Craft Artist from Serif but in my own collection of digi kits I didn’t have any holly. Luckily my computer was online at the time, and after scrolling through lists of elements, I discovered that there was a digikit available that had THE most perfect holly. DH helped me download and install ‘Yuletide Joy’ digi kit and I put some papers and images together to make the bag.

After a play, I also worked out how to make a smaller gift bag from a single sheet of A4 card. I redesigned my layout to work in that format. I worked out where the scorelines would be so I could place my main image (holly) in the right place and in the later bags I’ve also added a seasonal greeting. LOVE LOVE the versatility of Craft Artist, there are plenty of projects that you can print out or just add background papers too. Once you get going though, the only limit really is your imagination.

Medium/Large and small Gift Bags. Christmas Holly 2011

Craft Artist is ideal for crafters of all levels and is really easy to use, great if you don’t have much room to craft in.

Not got Craft Artist yet? You so need it, if pennies are tight there is a free version of a cut down version of the software available and there are also some free digikits too. Treat yourself to a craft room on your computer, the embellishments and papers in the digikits are stunning, best of all you can use them over and over again, and you don’t need to find shelf space for all the stash 🙂

Really wish there was more light so I could film a video tutorial of how to make these. Autumn/winter in the UK though is very low light and I need very bright sunny day AND all the lights on to get something worth watching. Made lots of notes along the way, so there will be a video tutorial of this when the light allows.

News Updates

New projects have been added to the tabs across the top of the blog.
Check out the 'About' tab, for Challenge themes and free downloadable Calendar Pages are now on there too. Now you can access these all year long.
Just had a tidy up of the side bar and joined Pinterest, do use the follow button to keep up to date with new posts and updates.
Have fun
Billie :)

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